Did you know your cervical mucus gives you critical insight to the state of your fertility as well as your hormones?
Did you know that a regular, ovulatory cycle with no presence of cervical mucus is considered a non-fertile cycle?
The secretion and presence of cervical mucus is essential for fertility for several reasons:
1. It creates a more alkaline environment to protect the sperm. The otherwise acidic environment of the vagina is not conducive to sperm.
2. Peak cervical mucus creates super highway channels to assist in the transportation of sperm up through the cervix and into the uterus.
3. Cervical mucus contain enzymes and proteins that nourish sperm and help to activate them to more effectively penetrate an egg.
4. Cervical mucus is intelligent and knows how to weed out less optimal sperm from healthy
sperm. Cervical mucus can immobilise the poor quality sperm and allows the good ones to travel onwards to the cervix.
Fertility aside, understanding your cervical mucus patterns helps to identify the opening of your fertile window. This is useful information for your whole reproductive life; whether or not you are trying to conceive!
The presence and quality of your cervical mucus can tell you about your hormones. Estrogen is a huge driver for cervical mucus production. Complete absence of cervical mucus in ovulatory cycles can be a sign your oestrogen levels may be low and is worth investigating with your Women’s Health focused practitioner.
Lauren Curtain
Lauren Curtain is a registered Chinese medicine practitioner, women's health focused acupuncturist and herbalist. She centres her practice around supporting women to navigate their hormones, menstrual cycles and fertility using a combination of education (all the women’s health info you didn't get in high school), acupuncture, herbal medicine, nutrition and lifestyle support. Lauren believes every woman has the right to know how her body works, and what she can do to optimise not only her reproductive health, but whole body health. Lauren has seen firsthand with her patients the dramatic improvements that can be made to reproductive health through simple, inexpensive, non-invasive techniques and firmly believes symptomatic periods and menstrual cycles can be a thing of the past and we can embody a thriving fertile life.
